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Should teachers be paid purely based on years of experience?

Should teachers be paid purely based on years of experience?

  • Yes, they should be paid more each year they teach.

    Votes: 3 9.4%

  • No (please explain how you think they should be paid)

    Votes: 29 90.6%
  • Total voters
    32
samsmart said:
Maybe what would be better than having "2-weeks off" every 6 weeks is to instead give the students 2 weeks of "self teaching" at the school once every 6 weeks. During those 2 weeks, students will be allowed to pursue their own interests at school with only a moderate amount of teacher involvement. This may turn teachers into glorified babysitters for 2 weeks after every 6, but I don't see that as being a particular problem since schools already have the facilities to allow it.
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god forbid we actually expect parents to be inconvenienced or pay a little money for daycare to go to year round schooling. I have a novel idea, why don't we take all those worthless ****s on welfare, bring them into the schools for the two weeks to baby sit the kids and let the teachers spend those two weeks attending seminars and training classes. that way the parents still won't have to be involved in their kid's education.
 
The biggest stride we could make is to change the culture of America. Parents should limit video game time, instill discipline in their children, and teach them that education is the most important thing in their lives. Once the gangsta culture, or that which values ignorance and coolness over intelligence, is destroyed, schools and students will improve dramatically.
 
Our 2 kids are smart, get that from their father, of course....
actually, mom has all the degrees in the family, a Bachelors and 2 masters...
anyway, for SOME of their years in the early grades, they had teachers who allowed them to help the slower students. But for the most part, they just pulled out a book and read when teacher had to go over some topic several times for the slower kids.
As for elected officials, our years in Idaho showed how much damage a school board can do when it is infested with farmers...
 
samsmart said:
And the best teacher can't teach a smart kid much of anything if the teacher's hands get tied by elected officials looking for a shotgun solution to education.
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yep, best teacher can't teach any kid much of anything when they have to spend 80% of the class period keeping thugs and criminals under control.
 
UtahBill said:
There are far more inferior students in the schools than there are inferior teachers. How do you fire a student? Or the parents who don't care enough about their kids to make them do their homework?
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that would be great. fire the crap students. you refuse to perform in school...we got a job for you picking up trash along the interstate or patrolling the border looking for illegals.
 
Kandahar said:
You can work for an asshole who's got an issue with you at ANY job. Why should teachers be treated differently? I'll say it once again: The purpose of schools are to educate students, not to provide jobs for teachers. While I'm certainly willing to give arguments a fair hearing if people don't think that certain policies will lead to better student results, I am almost wholly unsympathetic to arguments that don't even consider whether it might help the students and instead just argue "That isn't fair to the teachers." That's too bad, as long as it helps the students. The school is for the students, not the teachers.

Will the occasional good teacher get fired under a merit system? Yeah, probably. Sucks for them. They can go to the school in the next district over and get a job, with their proven results in hand.
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This thread is about teachers is it not? I think it is.
 
UtahBill said:
Our 2 kids are smart, get that from their father, of course....
actually, mom has all the degrees in the family, a Bachelors and 2 masters...
anyway, for SOME of their years in the early grades, they had teachers who allowed them to help the slower students. But for the most part, they just pulled out a book and read when teacher had to go over some topic several times for the slower kids.
As for elected officials, our years in Idaho showed how much damage a school board can do when it is infested with farmers...
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My older two kids are both smart, never had a problem in school what they didn't get in class the wife or I supplemented at home. Our young two (adopted) struggled in school due to developmental issues cuased by their crackhead birth moms. They just weren't getting the individualized attention they needed in school. We decided to make the sacrifice and my wife quit work to stay home and homeschool them. I pitch in with math and science in the evenings. It would have been much easier for us to have just let them coast through public school and graduated not knowing a damn thing.
 
OscarB63 said:
My older two kids are both smart, never had a problem in school what they didn't get in class the wife or I supplemented at home. Our young two (adopted) struggled in school due to developmental issues cuased by their crackhead birth moms. They just weren't getting the individualized attention they needed in school. We decided to make the sacrifice and my wife quit work to stay home and homeschool them. I pitch in with math and science in the evenings. It would have been much easier for us to have just let them coast through public school and graduated not knowing a damn thing.
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Adopting is tricky business. But you are probably up to the challenge. We have one nephew who is raising 2 boys who are suffering from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. His wife is long gone, probably out somewhere poisoning another fetus...
 
OscarB63 said:
complete and total horseshi ite. the greatest single predictor is the quality of the student. the best teacher in the world can't teach a moron to be a brain surgeon.
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I said that teacher quality is the most important variable in our education system. A student's innate ability lies outside the purview of things that can be changed by government policy.

Furthermore, the best teacher in the world might not be able to teach a moron to be a brain surgeon, but he can at least teach a moron to be a productive member of society. At least in the aggregate, if not in all individual cases.
 
UtahBill said:
There are far more inferior students in the schools than there are inferior teachers. How do you fire a student?
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By expelling them for misbehavior, or transferring them to a school for students with behavioral or learning disabilities.

UtahBill said:
Or the parents who don't care enough about their kids to make them do their homework?
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What exactly do you propose that we do about that? :confused:

I've always believed that blaming the parents is just a cop-out, because it is an excuse to avoid making necessary changes to our educational system. Of course there are bad parents, but there is very little that can be done about that. Replacing bad teachers is easy...or at least it should be.
 
American said:
This thread is about teachers is it not? I think it is.
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No, actually it's about teacher pay. But regardless of what you think this thread is about, our educational system should be geared toward students, not teachers.
 
Kandahar said:
I said that teacher quality is the most important variable in our education system. A student's innate ability lies outside the purview of things that can be changed by government policy.

Furthermore, the best teacher in the world might not be able to teach a moron to be a brain surgeon, but he can at least teach a moron to be a productive member of society. At least in the aggregate, if not in all individual cases.
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all true, but many times the teacher gets the blame for crap outside their control. especially in High School, in many cases by the time you get a kid in your class, he/she is so far behind that it is simply impossible for you to teach them.


How can you teach a kid chemistry if they can't even do simple math?

How can you teach them history if they can't freaking read?

the elementary grades, IMHO, are where the ball is being dropped. No one wants to "hurt feelings" or make a kid feel bad, so they just pass their stupid ass along without teaching them dick. so then they get to HS with a ****ing 2nd grade reading ability and can't do more than add 2+2. then the High school teachers get called out and abused because these kids fail.
 
Kandahar said:
No, actually it's about teacher pay. But regardless of what you think this thread is about, our educational system should be geared toward students, not teachers.
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good luck getting quality people into the profession without considering the needs of the teachers. that's one of the problems with the system today. the only ones in it are

a. people who are too dumb to do anything else, so they teach

b. people who are married to someone that makes good money so they don't really need to make much money

c. people who love kids and teaching so much that they work at a demanding usually low paying job
 
I think some people in this thread have misconceptions about how merit pay could work.

Bad: "Mr. Smith's 4th grade class class reads at an average 5.0 grade level, and Mrs. Jones' 4th grade class reads at an average 3.5 grade level. Therefore Mr. Smith is a better teacher than Mrs. Jones."

Better: "Mr. Smith's class reads at an average 5.0 grade level, but those same students read at a 4.5 grade level last year. Mrs. Jones' class reads at an average 3.5 grade level, compared to only a 2.5 grade level last year. Therefore Mrs. Jones is a better teacher than Mr. Smith."

Even better: "Mrs. Jones' class is 60% African-American, 20% Hispanic, and 20% White. 82% of her students are eligible for free lunches, and 15% speak English as a second language. The families in the district earn an average income of $20,000. For an average teacher of this particular remedial reading class, it is appropriate to expect the students to improve by 0.692 grade levels per year on average. Mrs. Jones' class improved by 1.0 grade levels, making her a phenomenal teacher."
 
That last example is acceptable to me.
 
Kandahar said:
I think some people in this thread have misconceptions about how merit pay could work.

Bad: "Mr. Smith's 4th grade class class reads at an average 5.0 grade level, and Mrs. Jones' 4th grade class reads at an average 3.5 grade level. Therefore Mr. Smith is a better teacher than Mrs. Jones."

Better: "Mr. Smith's class reads at an average 5.0 grade level, but those same students read at a 4.5 grade level last year. Mrs. Jones' class reads at an average 3.5 grade level, compared to only a 2.5 grade level last year. Therefore Mrs. Jones is a better teacher than Mr. Smith."

Even better: "Mrs. Jones' class is 60% African-American, 20% Hispanic, and 20% White. 82% of her students are eligible for free lunches, and 15% speak English as a second language. The families in the district earn an average income of $20,000. For an average teacher of this particular remedial reading class, it is appropriate to expect the students to improve by 0.692 grade levels per year on average. Mrs. Jones' class improved by 1.0 grade levels, making her a phenomenal teacher."
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school administrators are notoriously lazy, you can bet your ass that 90% of the time you are going to get the "bad" scenario. the "even better" scenario would take too much time and effort on their part.
 
OscarB63 said:
school administrators are notoriously lazy, you can bet your ass that 90% of the time you are going to get the "bad" scenario. the "even better" scenario would take too much time and effort on their part.
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They don't have to do it themselves. They're already collecting all the data under NCLB anyway. All they need to do is turn it over to a company like IBM, Oracle, or many smaller ones (after stripping out the names or any other confidential information), and outsource all the data analytics to the experts.
 
Kandahar said:
They don't have to do it themselves. They're already collecting all the data under NCLB anyway. All they need to do is turn it over to a company like IBM, Oracle, or many smaller ones (after stripping out the names or any other confidential information), and outsource all the data analytics to the experts.
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and with all the school systems and state govts screaming "we're underfunded" who is going to pay for it?

I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, just that in today's political and economic climate I don't see how it would be implemented any other way than poorly.
 
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OscarB63 said:
and with all the school systems and state govts screaming "we're underfunded" who is going to pay for it?
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How much does the average incompetent teacher earn, including benefits? Even if it did nothing more than eliminate the two worst teachers in each school, it would justify the cost.
 
Kandahar said:
How much does the average incompetent teacher earn, including benefits? Even if it did nothing more than eliminate the two worst teachers in each school, it would justify the cost.
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not really because you would have to replace them with two competent teachers...who you would then have to pay more.
 
OscarB63 said:
not really because you would have to replace them with two competent teachers...who you would then have to pay more.
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Not necessarily, as class size doesn't actually have very much correlation to student performance, despite the conventional wisdom. But I digress. My point is that data analytics is not particularly expensive for a school, since there really isn't that much data to analyze. IBM could do it all in a single day. Even a failing school should be able to find enough money for something that will actually help students. And if not, raise taxes to pay for it. More educational spending would be well worth it, if it actually improved student performance as this would. The problem is that schools waste too much money on crap that doesn't actually benefit students.
 
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I guess my concern is that it really doesn't address what I consider to be the root problem. the root problem isn't the existance of a small % of crappy teachers. the root problem is the % of crappy students that won't respond to even the best of teachers.

everyone is so concerned about getting rid of bad teachers. maybe we need to look into a method of getting rid of bad students.
 
OscarB63 said:
I guess my concern is that it really doesn't address what I consider to be the root problem. the root problem isn't the existance of a small % of crappy teachers. the root problem is the % of crappy students that won't respond to even the best of teachers.

everyone is so concerned about getting rid of bad teachers. maybe we need to look into a method of getting rid of bad students.
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Yep. We need to bring back tracking.
 
Kandahar said:
By expelling them for misbehavior, or transferring them to a school for students with behavioral or learning disabilities.



What exactly do you propose that we do about that? :confused:

I've always believed that blaming the parents is just a cop-out, because it is an excuse to avoid making necessary changes to our educational system. Of course there are bad parents, but there is very little that can be done about that. Replacing bad teachers is easy...or at least it should be.
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they can be fined if they allow their dropout kids to roam the streets, they can even be jailed right along those kids when they break the law.
Hillary liked to say, it takes a village to raise a child. I say if the village has no say in who has kids, the village should not be responsible for the kids. The village should have the right to say no to parents who have already demonstrated that they pop out kids just for the tax credit and have no desire to raise the child properly...
What ever happened to truant officers?
 
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